Since I need a new internal hard drive as well as an external, I was quite shocked when I saw that the prices for 1 TB internal drives start at about 80 € (I’m in Germany) and for external drives at 100 €. A 500 GB external drive by Western Digital I bought last September for 48.95 € now costs 79 €. I heard about the floods in Thailand in 2011 and the scarcity of hard drives on the market caused by them, but that was about a year ago, so I’m puzzled why the prices went up so much since last September.
So why are the prices so high at the moment, and is there a chance that they will fall in the near future?
Floods in Thailand last fall destroyed a huge percentage of world wide disk drive production capacity. Google “thailand flooding disk drive shortage” for more details. Shortages are expected well into this year.
Well, I thought the floods in Thailand had been in the spring of 2011 and was therefore puzzled why the prices went up since last fall. Your link explains it. Thanks.
After hearing dire warnings about the flood’s effect on prices, I was forced to buy several 3TB drives in January. I forget the price, but it was barely higher than 2TB drives last summer. So shop around.
I normally buy Western Digital Caviar Black internal hard drives. Before the price spice, I was able to get the 2Tb for about $150 (or possibly a little bit less.) I have not been able to find them for under $200 in the last few months. They have gone down significantly since I was last looking (when they were around $250, although that site shows a peak price of $280), but they’re still significantly more expensive than they were. The B&H price for the same drive is $250, and it’s out of stock.
For whatever reason, though, the external drives are running much cheaper. That WD 2TB external in the link you put up is $125. However, it was running at $90-$100 last year before the price spike, and it appears to only be very recently that the price went down.
I had to buy a couple of drives in January, both internal and external, and the prices were about 50% higher than usual for the drives with the specs I need. The cheapest price for a 1.5TB Caviar black internal that I could find on January 10 was $165. These used to go for $100. A 2.5TB WD Elements external, though, ran $160.
Oh, come now. I remember the hard drives of the 80s well enough, but you get used to a certain price point, and when your business expenditures on hard drives and backup all of a sudden jump by 50% or more, you notice it.
Missed the edit window: ETA: I should say when your expenditure jump by that amount when you were projecting per TB prices to remain constant or drop (like they usually do.) Normally, I put off buying new hard drives as long as I possibly can, as waiting an extra month or two can usually yield you a good 10-20% savings.
That 20mb drive you had (circa 1990?) held your OS, all of your programs, and all of your files. Stuff’s more sophisticated now, and it requires more storage.
Just because the prices have fallen dramatically since the days of the dinosaurs doesn’t mean they haven’t spiked now. There were similar price spikes in 2001/02. If you can hold off for 6 months, they should fall back in line.
The historical data shows this isn’t unusual, neither are sudden dramatic price drops. A 1 gb Seagate drive cost $849 in 1995. Western digital released a 1.6 gb drive in 1996 that sold for $399. On a per mb basis, that’s a 65% drop in 12 months.
Ah, yes, the days of Commodore 64 8-bit porn. Or, worse, ASCII porn. (It’s a couple links away from anything objectionable.) Those were the days! You had to stand far away from the screen or printout and use your imagination. Kids these days never had it so good.
That ASCII porn is hot stuff! It’s a little before my time and now I need to expand my pornographic (heh, graphic) horizons in new and interesting ways!
Oh, there was that, too. Walk into a brick-and-mortar like Fry’s or Office Depot and you can see all the empty spots on the shelves where the various hard drives used to be (at least it was still like that in January.) In my experience, that was coupled with higher prices on what was available (supply and demand and all that.) Online, it seemed like every other drive I looked at was “temporarily out of stock” or “limit 1 per order” or restrictions of that nature.
And as for old projections, I remember Ed Fredkin speaking to my class in 1973 and bravely predicting that some day memory would fall to a penny a bit.
and :eek: and :rolleyes: and :smack: